In God of War (2018), you spend the entire game mourning a woman who never says a word. She's just a body you carry up a mountain. The next game makes her the hero. And in the old stories, she once fought Thor to a standstill. Her name is Faye. She dies in the opening, and everything after is Kratos, the bald, furious warrior you play as, and his young son Atreus carrying her ashes to the highest peak in the world. You never hear her speak. You only ever see her wrapped in cloth, then burning on a funeral fire. What the games slowly reveal is who she was. To the giants she was Laufey the Just, a warrior who led uprisings against Odin and his gods and shielded the weak from them, even breaking their prisoners loose. She fought Thor once and neither of them won. He was drunk at the time, fine, but Thor is the hardest hitter the gods have, so holding him off at all says plenty. That famous axe Kratos throws and magically calls back to his hand was hers first. The dwarf blacksmiths Brok and Sindri forged it for her, built to match Thor's hammer, and she handed it down to Kratos before she died. She also quietly set the whole story in motion. She could see the future, so she marked the trees around their home, arranged her own funeral, and aimed Kratos and Atreus straight at the journey that eventually topples Odin. The person steering all of it spent the entire time as a corpse. Sony revealed God of War: Laufey at their June State of Play, with twenty minutes of gameplay. Everyone figured a prequel, since she's dead. Nope. Creative director Cory Barlog says it's "a continuation of the timeline," starting the moment after that funeral. Instead of resting in peace, Faye wakes up somewhere called the Everywhen, the afterlife of the gods. Dead gods from all kinds of myths claw over the last scraps of power there, and the plans she made to protect her family are already coming apart. The fighting is built around her, not her husband. Kratos is slow and heavy and hits like a truck. Faye is quick and airborne, leaping and juggling enemies in the air with a magic sword. She can hit an enemy hard enough to knock its soul clean out of its body, then start wailing on the soul itself. Deborah Ann Woll, Karen from Daredevil, plays her again, and the character is modeled on her face. Her first sidekick is a talking jelly cube named Phranque, voiced by Jack Quaid from The Boys. There's no release date yet, and it's PS5 only. The woman whose death powered two of the best action games ever made finally gets to fight her own war.